LSHTM Coronavirus & Health Survey
Thank you for participating in our study and for coming to this site to look at the results. We are busy working on our analysis of the data but we will be regularly updating the results that we put on this website. Please check back here to see the most recent results. Please note that the data presented below are largely descriptive at this stage and will be subjected to rigorous scientific tests before any results are published in full. At this stage, our data should be considered illustrative and subject to change. The results presented here are a draft document that makes no claims of being scientifically conclusive until further analysis has been completed.
Who has completed our survey?
A total of 1774 people have completed the survey since Tuesday 7th April 2020
Age
The chart below shows the age distribution of participants in our study. People aged 13 to over 80 years old have taken part in the study. We are especially keen to increase the number of participants in the youngest and oldest age groups so that our results represent the wider population
Ethnicity
The ethnic backgrounds of the people responding to our survey are shown in the table below, along with the national average in the UK. At present, we have an over-representation of White people, and an under-representation of Asian and Black participants. We are very keen to get more people from non-white backgrounds to participate in our study
| Ethnicity of participants | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ethnicity | sum | percentage | national_average1 |
| White | 1635 | 92.2 | 85.5 |
| Asian | 47 | 2.6 | 7.5 |
| Black | 10 | 0.6 | 3.4 |
| Mixed (White/Black) | 4 | 0.2 | 1.1 |
| Mixed (White/Asian) | 13 | 0.7 | 0.6 |
| Another Ethnic Group | 21 | 1.2 | 0.6 |
| Mixed (Other) | 16 | 0.9 | 0.5 |
| Arabic | 3 | 0.2 | 0.4 |
| Unknown | 12 | 0.7 | 0.4 |
| Prefer not to say | 13 | 0.7 | NA |
Gender
Females significantly outnumber all other gender types, with male respondents making up just 23.96% of the respondents. Responses from all everybody are valued and we hope in time that more people from underrepresented genders will complete the survey at https://enketo.lshtm.ac.uk/::wsqM5QPj
| Gender of participants | ||
|---|---|---|
| gender | sum | percentage |
| Female | 1325 | 74.7 |
| Male | 425 | 24.0 |
| Prefer not to say | 17 | 1.0 |
| Gender fluid or non-binary | 7 | 0.4 |
Employment and Work
The majority of our participants either have a job or are retired, although we have some representation of people who either do not work, cannot work or are jobseekers.
If someone told us that they had either a full-time or part-time job, or that they were self-employed, we asked them what sector they worked in. Our participants came from a wide range of different sectors of the economy, but there appears to be a small bias away from primary industries such as manufactoring agriculture and energy.
Household Income
We expect that there might be some big differences in the way that different households manage during the COVID-19 pandemic. This may have something to do with how wealthy different households are. So far, our survey seems to have received slightly fewer responses from people in the least and the most wealthy households.
Educational Qualifications
People who have a degree or higher qualification have so far been more likely to respond to the survey. Over time and once more respondents have taken part, we hope that there will be a more even spread of people with different educational qualification
| Educational Qualifications | ||
|---|---|---|
| education | sum | percentage |
| Completed Primary School | 15 | 0.8 |
| GCSE/O-levels | 193 | 10.9 |
| A level/Higher | 118 | 6.7 |
| Further education | 312 | 17.6 |
| University (first) degree | 486 | 27.4 |
| Post-graduate degree | 582 | 32.8 |
| Prefer not to say | 27 | 1.5 |
| NA | 41 | 2.3 |
Where people live
Participants have responded from from across the UK country but around 26.7% live in London.
Most participants of the survey live in houses with gardens, but a large proportion of people live in flats with no gardens. Given that lockdown puts limits on how often people can leave their properties, we are keen to investigate the importance of private gardens in people’s lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Access to private outdoors spaces is likely to be a key feature of our planned analysis.
| Residence | n | percent |
|---|---|---|
| House | ||
| With a garden | 1386 | 78.1 |
| Without a garden | 22 | 1.2 |
| Flat | ||
| Without a garden | 201 | 11.3 |
| With a garden | 113 | 6.4 |
| Other Residence | ||
| With a garden | 36 | 2.0 |
| Without a garden | 3 | 0.2 |
| No Data | ||
| With a garden | 4 | 0.2 |
| Without a garden | 1 | 0.1 |
Current Behaviours
What people are doing at the moment
Almost everyone is following the social distancing recomendations at the present time with many saying they are isolating. Four in five people are regularly exercising and most people are keeping in touch with neighbours and their community and spending time with loved ones.
| Current behaviours (male) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Behaviour | Number | Percentage |
| Social Distancing | 399 | 98 |
| Isolation | 346 | 85 |
| Quarantined | 32 | 10 |
| Stockpiling | 45 | 12 |
| Quitting smoking | 20 | 6 |
| Regular exercise | 323 | 80 |
| Keeping in touch with neighbours/community | 290 | 74 |
| Community action to support those affected | 93 | 25 |
| Quality time with loved ones | 267 | 69 |
| Current behaviours (female) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Behaviour | Number | Percentage |
| Social Distancing | 1220 | 98 |
| Isolation | 1015 | 82 |
| Quarantined | 95 | 10 |
| Stockpiling | 142 | 13 |
| Quitting smoking | 40 | 4 |
| Regular exercise | 980 | 79 |
| Keeping in touch with neighbours/community | 957 | 79 |
| Community action to support those affected | 340 | 32 |
| Quality time with loved ones | 818 | 70 |
Experiences of having suffered from COVID-19
The following chart shows the percentage of people who think that they currently have or have had a case of COVID-19. These are ‘possible’ cases.
For the time being we have limited numbers of people who are transgender, gender fluid, non-binary or of another gender, so we have only include people who were male and female in this analysis.
A total of 284 (16%) of participants believe that they have had COVID-19 but have now recovered.
A total of 30 (1.7%) of participants believe that they have currently got COVID-19
These are not confirmed cases, but reflect self-reported disease. It is unlikely that all of these possible cases were true cases of COVID-19, but it will be interesting to see whether the percentages increase as the outbreak progresses.
The percentages are fairly similar for males and females, although it looks like around two times as many women think that they have a current case of COVID-19. It also seems that more women think that they have had a previous case of COVID-19.
Participants who thought that they had recovered from COVID-19
We currently have too little data to make much of the age distribution of possible cases, though from what data are available, it looks like more people in the 35-44 year old age group have said that they believe that they have had a case of COVID-19. There is currently no way to know if this reflects the true rate of disease in different groups or if it might be something to do with the differences between the groups.
| Number of participants recovered from COVID-19, by age group | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| age | total participants | recovered | percent_recovered |
| 13-19 | 20 | 5 | 25.0 |
| 20-24 | 40 | 6 | 15.0 |
| 25-29 | 82 | 13 | 15.9 |
| 30-34 | 116 | 14 | 12.1 |
| 35-39 | 159 | 39 | 24.5 |
| 40-44 | 215 | 47 | 21.9 |
| 45-49 | 202 | 37 | 18.3 |
| 50-54 | 146 | 25 | 17.1 |
| 55-59 | 209 | 32 | 15.3 |
| 60-64 | 208 | 32 | 15.4 |
| 65-69 | 179 | 16 | 8.9 |
| 70-74 | 128 | 17 | 13.3 |
| 75-79 | 53 | 1 | 1.9 |
Age Distribution of possible COVID-19 Cases 
Duration of Symptoms in possible COVID-19 Cases
Within the group of people who thought that they had previously had COVID-19, we asked participants to tell us the number of days during which they had had symptoms of the disease. A large percentage of people told us that their symptoms had lasted ten or more days.
Because COVID-19 carries higher risk in older age groups, we were interested in finding out if people with possible (not confirmed) cases of COVID-19 had symptoms that lasted longer if they were in particular age groups.
So far we have limited amounts of data, particularly in the youngest and oldest age groups, so nothing can be learned from this chart at this stage. Updates to the data may change this as the study progresses.
When split by gender, it seems that both men and women reported symptoms lasting longer than 10 days in around a third of cases. More men (as a percentage) reported symptoms lasting between 3 and 5 days than women. A robust statistical analysis would be required to make any conclusions about this issue and this will follow in a later update to this report.
Number of cases in affected households
In households where COVID-19 cases were reported, we were interested in how many people in the household thought that they had been infected. The chart shows the number of people who thought they had had COVID-19, split by household size. The grey boxes show the size of the household and the blue bars show what percentage of households that size reported having n number of cases in them (where n is a number smaller than the household size).
There appears to be some misreporting as a number of people who said that they believed that they had suffered COVID-19 reported zero cases in their household. Nonetheless it is clear from the data that COVID-19 symptoms do not develop in all members of affected households.
It seems unlikely that many people living in a household with an affected case could avoid any exposure to virus particles. As such we think that this may relate to the fact that lots of people with COVID-19 have an infection but no symptoms. It is also possible that some people are resistant to infection.
Smoking
Smoking is a risk factor for many diseases. In our data we had a similar percentage of both current and past-smokers in both the group of people who had not had COVID-19 and in the groups who thought they had current or previous COVID-19. Whilst this does not provide obvious evidence that smoking is a risk factor for getting symptoms of COVID-19, the chart also does not necessarily indicate that smoking is not a risk factor. The number of smokers in the data is rather small and we have not yet performed tests to show whether there is a statistically significant difference between the groups. Smoking may also impact on severity of symptoms and on outcome of severe disease, which we have not yet investigated.
The government’s response to COVID-19
Most people (62.5%) believed that the government has been making good decisions about how to control COVID-19
Around 51.4 of people trusted that the goverenment tells the truth about coronavirus and COVID-19 most or all of the time.
29.5% of participants thought that the government sometimes told the truth and 13.1% thought that the government almost never or never told the truth about the outbreak.
If you were in charge, what would you do to control the outbreak?
We asked people what they would do if they were in charge of controlling the outbreak. TPeople could provide their own text and could say anything they liked. With so many answers it can be hard to rapidly understand patterns in the answers and we will be doing some in depth analysis of these answers.
To provide a rapid view of the kinds of things that people said, we generated word-clouds. These show the words that were most frequently mentioned, with more frequent words being shown in larger text.
How you choose to interpret the meaning of these individual words in wordclouds is entirely up to you, but some such as ‘testing’, ‘PPE’, ‘stricter’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘earlier’ might give a good idea of the kinds of topics people are most concerned about at the present time
Misinformation and rumours
Have you heard of people doing interesting, unusual or different things to fight coronavirus?
During our work on previous infectious disease outbreaks, we have heard of many interesting and unusual approaches to treatment and cure. Many or most of these do not have any proven effect and some can be very harmful. Only a small percentage (9.1%) of participants reported hearing of unusual or interesting control methods. We will wait until we have much more data before we make any attempts to analyse this data. A wordcloud is provided for interest.
Isolation and loneliness
We asked people if they were worried about becoming lonely whilst on lockdown. Surprisingly few people said that they were feeling more than a little worried about suffering from loneliness, but 20-25 year olds appeared to be more worried compared to other groups.
We also looked at whether the number of people in the household had an association with how worried people felt about loneliness. We observe from the limited data available so far that people who lived alone said that they were ‘very worried’ or ‘terrified’ more often than other groups. We did not include larger households (6+ people) in this analysis due to the limited numbers.
Depression
The tables below show the data about how depressed people have felt during lockdown. The first chart shows how older partipants more frequently reported that they had not felt down, depressed or hopeless at all. Conversely, the younger groups were more likely to have felt this way on ‘several days’ of the last two weeks. In the very youngest group (13-19) we saw a greater percentage report that they felt down or depressed on more than half the days, but our numbers of participants in this group are small and the data possibly unreliable in this age group.
Impact on Life and lifestyle
Food supplies During the early phase of the outbreak and just before lockdown began, the UK saw a period of panic buying of food. We asked how long participants could last without having to go out to buy food and a clear majority reported a period between 4 and 14 days.
Prescription Medicine Supplies
Perhaps more worrying is that a substantial percentage of people rely on prescription medicine. We looked at how long people could go on their current supply of prescription medicines and there appeared to be a relatively broadly distributed range of answers.
But when we looked at the same data according to how scared participants were about the COVID-19 outbreak in general, it seemed that those who had shorter supplies of prescription medicine (4-7 days) were more likely to say that they were ‘very worried’ whilst those whose supplies were now critically low (1-3 days) were more likely to be ‘terrified’.
Fear
In general, the majority of people said that they were at least a little worried about the coronavirus outbreak, but relatively few said that they were terrified. As we showed above though, it is important to remember that those who are terrified may be among those who are most vulnerable.
Roughly what percentage of people in your community do you think will catch coronavirus at some point?
We found that people’s estimates of how many people in their community would catch coronavirus at some point varied greatly. This is perhaps unsurprising given the uncertainty of the course of the outbreak. It is however very clear that very few people think that the entire population, or more than 90%, would eventually be infected.
Do you think that it is acceptable for governments to force some people to change their behaviours in order to control COVID-19?
There was almost universal agreement that this would be acceptable.
On 23rd March 2020, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a complete lockdown in the UK. Tell us what you have been doing to help you cope during this difficult time?
As with other free text style questions, we will be taking a deeper look at the answers to this question and for the time being rely on the use of wordclouds to show us what people are doing.
We are happy to see that the things that seem most important to people and which help them to cope during the outbreak are friends and family
We would like to thank all participants for their contributions to this research. We will update this page regularly with more detailed analysis, so please check back soon.
Stay Home, Save Lives
About This Study
This research has received approval from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) observational research ethics committee (Reference 21846)
The scientists leading this work are Dr Shelley Lees and Dr Chrissy Roberts.
This study is anonymous, which means that we will neither know who you are, nor keep any information about your precise location.
For more information on the background of this study, please visit http://opendatakit.lshtm.ac.uk/lshtm-edk-coronavirus-health-survey/